The home, which was run by an order of Catholic nuns and closed in 1961, was one of many such institutions that housed tens of thousands of orphans and unmarried pregnant women who were forced to give up their children throughout much of the 20th century.
In 2014, historian Catherine Corless tracked down death certificates for nearly 800 children who died at the home in Tuam between the 1920s and 1961 — but could only find a burial record for one child.
Catholics… If hell exists it’ll be full of 'em.
Naww… hell is gonna be cool. The real hell will be “their heaven”
Religion is fucked up.
Don’t trust any religious people.
They’re all sick in the head.
If you’re not religious why are you upset that some people didn’t get a proper burial?
There were death certificates so it’s unlikely there’s foul play, unless there’s some details this poorly written article is missing. It’s just they didn’t observe proper religious ceremony on the disposal of the deceased.
So your argument is that religious people are bad because some religious people don’t always follow religious ceremonies? Like if you don’t think religion is good, why would you be upset over improper disposal of the deceased?
Proper disposal of the deceased isn’t limited to religious people.
Yeah, I’m sure there was no foul play in an abusive institution dealing with most vunerable members of society.
Why do people simp for organized religion so hard?
This is the second time this week I’ve seen this argument:
- Religion has historically done X
- religion is bad
- why do you care about X, that’s religious!
(The last one was about marriage)
I suspect that you’re a religious person making a slippery slope fallacy.
slippery slope fallacy
Did you just randomly select some fallacy from a list in an attempt to sound clever?
I don’t give a fuck about proper burials.
Burying bodies in cemeteries is an incredibly selfish thing. All cemeteries and golf courses should be converted into income based housing.
I only said religious people are fucked in the head. Full stop.
All religious people are mentally unwell and a danger to society.
I hope that cleared it up!
You sound like an Israeli talking about Palestinians. Or a Nazi talking about furries. Or, dare I say, a religious person talking about atheists…
You are religious too, it’s just that your religion is atheism. You’re just as dogmatic as those nuns.
Saucy! No sequitir! Illogical! And removed by mod!? LOL
Honestly I think that thinking that having a place for people to grieve their loved ones is a selfish thing is realy fucked in the head.
You don’t need a grief theme park full of buried corpses. You can grieve anywhere.
Believe me, I’ve done it too many times to mention, both for family and friends.
Sure, plant and dedicate a tree. Or a bench by a lake. Or keep an urn on your mantle. Or thousands of other ways. But, sorry you can’t live here because we need this space exclusively to grieve?
Well, the tree thing is reality for those that chose forest burials (at least thats a thing in my country).
I think we would run out of benches by lakes rather quick. Also, that is a thing already.
Keeping an Urn is not legal everywhere. I agree the it should be.
The thing is, that humans want to do something with he their loves ones remains. We are incredibly social creates, to the point where our bonds last beyond death. We have buried our dead for thousands and thousands of years. Neanderthals buried their dead. It’s just an extremely human way to process grieve, complete independent of any religion.
So having a dedicated space to do so makes total sense. Of course that takes up room. But I’d argue that having a park like, walkable and often very beautiful place in your neighborhood is a net win for everybody. Unless you think that we should also get rid of parks and other recreational areas.
And, you have the possibility to visit a dedicated place of grievance close by, which is sensible especially for elderly people.
We would run out of benches by lakes.
But not land to bury dead people forever?!
I find your lack of logic… disturbing.
Fair enoth.
Anything of value to add to the rest of my comment?
Wait what? 20 deaths a year and because there is a death certificate there is no foul play?
The article mentions “tens of thousands” of births but doesn’t state the numbers of people that were at this particular site. The infant death rate ranged from over 60/1000 down to 20/1000 for developed countries and higher for worldwide estimates.
Lacking numbers for the number of births there’s no way to compare to the averages, but yeah 20 deaths per year could very well be a normal rate. We tend not to think a lot about infant death rates because it’s not a fun subject, but it’s it’s a historical fact.
I get that people are addicted to being outraged, but a higher infant death rate over 60 years ago compared to today’s rate may not be something to get super emotional about until there’s specific allegations of foul play or at least some data to indicate there was something out of norm besides improper disposal of the deceased.
There were death certificates so the government at the time was aware of the number of deaths, and they didn’t seem to think it was out of the norm. Though it’s possible they just didn’t care. But in that case the government would be complicit in this so there should be hard questions asked about the government, not just the church. But that doesn’t seem to be happening, so it seems the controversy is just about corpse disposal 60 to 100 years ago.
There is plenty of evidence for the abuse and unaliving of children before the bodies were hidden.
Sources:
These homes existed purely to punish unwed mothers, because Catholicism. Don’t even try to minimise the deep national trauma still felt today because it might show a weirdo cult in a bad light.
Priests molested altar boys. That’s some real fucking trauma that left lifetimes of emotional scars on people that still alive now.
But sure something that happened to some dead bodies over 60 years ago is something you want to devote your two minutes of atheist hate towards today. You’re well adjusted and have everything in the proper perspective, LOL.
You don’t think it was traumatic for young women (plenty of whom are still alive) to be kidnapped into these institutions, physically and mentally abused, and have their newborn child (again, a great number still alive and wondering who they are) forcibly removed from them, with no idea where they ended up?
That’s not very fair. It’s fairly safe to assume that each of those babies were linked to lifetimes of emotional scars, too, just not for the babies.
I dont agree with the original commenter, but come on.
This is a thread about babies.
Do you really think people need a religion to see that throwing their dead bodies in a septic tank is an incredibly disrespectful and dehumanizing act?
I dont need to wish for a christian burial to understand the implications of christian nuns doing this.
Holy shit.
Article - 800 dead babies.
You - There was no sign of foul play why would you heathens care about burial?
Get your fucking head checked.
You realise you don’t need to be religious to believe that people deserve a proper burial right? There doesn’t need to be some man in the sky watching everyone 24/7 for people to be buried with dignity
Yeah, burial is mostly just to make sure critters don’t drag your rotting bits out into the open and your putrid parts don’t contaminate the water supply.
That’s the practical aspect, but I believe the dignity and respect shown throughout the process gives people some closure.
There’s only two religions in the planet that do this kind of thing with any frequency. Don’t make yourself sound like a literal Reddit atheist. You’re here exactly because Reddit sucks. Don’t bring it back.
Many people are religious without doing this kind of shit.
Only two? Hahahahahaha
Show me examples of Buddhists, Native Americans, or Paganists doing this kind of stuff. The literal reason Islamism and Christianity are particularly bad is because they’re mass-adopted and politicians take advantage of that.
Just remove all religion from politics and there won’t be any problems. Human rights dictate freedom of religion AND FROM religion, not just the later.
Buddhists - Rohynga Genocide
Native Americans - Aztec human sacrifice, up to 20,000 per year.
Paganists - not a thing. Paganism is a description, not a religion. But there are plenty of neo-Nazi neo-pagan groups who love burning churches.
All religions are poison. Picking which is worse between lead poisoning or arsenic?
That’s all you bud.
I’ll be poison free.
So like I used to be anti-religion. But when I studied the history of religious thought, it seemed like every criticism I had of religion I was able to find a religious tradition which explicitly accounted for that criticism, and it made me realize a lot of the essential beliefs that I had about religion in general were simply untrue. Like there are religious traditions that literally deny institutionalization (so you can’t even associate religion in general with organized religion), there are literally religions that explicitly reject the existence of any kind of deity (so you can’t even identify religion with a belief in some kind of a god). In general, it seemed like the only thing that literally all religions had in common was that they represented a set of metaphysical beliefs that an individual has attached themself to for whatever reason. And I realized that it’s kind of impossible to never make any metaphysical assumptions about the world we live in. And I started to ask myself questions like “is it even possible to reject the entire category of religious thought in a meaningful way while still retaining the ability to reason about the world?” And “is there actually a good reason why I don’t want to think of my own humanist ideas about the world as religious in nature, or does it just make me feel kind of funny because I had already prejudiced myself so heavily against the concept of religious thought?”
Weird. I had the exact opposite experience.
I find every religion to be a liars den of lies.
And all religious people are liars fools or worse.
Humanism and religion are polar opposite ideas.
Don’t apologize for religion. It’s gross.
Keep that shit away from me and my kids. You bring it near my kids we are going to have a fucking problem.
I feel like you didn’t actually try to understand any of what I just said. I hate to break it to you, but it’s literally just a fact that there are religions that make metaphysical assumptions that are literally equivalent to secular humanism. If you think that they’re actually contradictory, it just means that you probably actually haven’t tried to study the history of religious thought from an actually critical perspective where you didn’t just presume that you already had it all figured out.
If you think every religious person is evil then I’m sorry, but your religious trauma is not an excuse. Go back to reddit.
The people are not evil. They are mostly indoctrinated and duped. The religion itself is just as evil as any other virus that weasels in.
A lot of words to apologize for evil.
No. You go back to church.
Fuck your god.
Not necessarily evil. But every religious person is damaging to society and the environment out of ignorance, because, for example, their voting is based on beliefs disjunct from reality, including absolute morals that will vilify a substantial part of the populace for no sane reason.
This is not a position born out of logic and reason, but out of hate. I hope you get better at some point, you obviously have suffered a lot to become filled with rage this much.
This is not a position born out of logic and reason, but out of hate.
Bingo.
All religions are hate groups. EVERY SINGLE ONE.
You nailed it.
You’re so close to getting better yourself.
You’re so close to getting better yourself.
You don’t sound like someone who is doing well, why would anyone want to be like you? The folk replying to you are applying empathy and patience while you shut everyone down with vitriol.
Being angry isn’t fun, anger slowly drains you of your joy and energy. Anger only feels like fun when the alternative is to face pain
Almost every religion has some kind of missionary element, trying to spread or enforce its beliefs (and selling it as eternal truth). That’s basically how they survive and grow.
That’s the core problem for me: the need to convince others to believe the same thing. It turns personal belief into pressure, and that’s exactly why I don’t trust any religion.
Yes, it’s not all religions, but … (you should know how to finish the sentence)
Have you heard of the Rohingya genocide? Buddhists absolutely do fucked up shit.
I would agree with you that not all religion is bad. But singling out Christianity and Islam as the exclusively bad ones is absurd.
And let’s not forget what the peace-loving Sinhalese Buddhists did to the Tamils in Sri Lanka.
Holy shit. A nuanced take on religion on lemmy not downvoted into oblivion
Christians, Muslims and Jews. Disproven. Now go away, troll (or misinformed idiot)
Sorry that your religious trauma causes you to be bigoted, I guess. You’re no better than Israelis.
Tell me you know nothing about buddhism without telling me you know nothing about buddhism. While we’re at it, opinions on hinduism?
Smaller religions have been sacrificing children since the stone age.
I’m not saying its all bad, but singling out two religions in your general area and blaming the problem on them being “political” as if religion isn’t based on dictating social norms is ridiculous.
I agree with the freedom to believe, though. Doesnt mean that there arent inherent dangers to this stuff. You’re in a thread about murdered babies, please keep that in mind.
Religion is a social cancer. Sometimes it’s benign and the host reabsorbs it. Other times it’s spreads and kills living tissue
I’d say it’s like a tailbone. It was once useful (when we were apes), but has long since lost all purpose. Now it is just a useless appendage and if you touch it the wrong way, you can end up paralized for the rest of your life. We can’t go without though, because it’s attached to out spine and muscles.
How could these nuns think they would be admitted to heaven?
Catholic Islam is a radical sect
Sorry *Christianity
You were right… same God, different prophet
I’m guessing that God probably knows the infant mortality rates throughout history.
Honestly if hell could be livestreamed I’d love to have a kick out of watching a 24 hour stream of them burning on it.
One of the selling features of Christianity is that you just need to ask Jesus forgiveness and it will be granted.
With Catholics you’re supposed to confess to a priest, but same difference to them, basically
If they pay an indulgence, even the rich will get into Heaven.
(So there must be a massive divine operation passing camels through the eyes of needles)
Because they didn’t allow abortion. That’s how
deleted by creator
“The remains ranged from 35 weeks gestation to 3 years old.” So not abortions but stillbirths and dead children. Conditions were appalling, rampant disease etc.
If you wait till it’s born, it’s not abortion anymore but sending those poor little angels directly to God who’s the only one who will ever be able to properly care for them or whatever kind of bullshit they used to justify what they did…
What the fuck
What?!!
I like how everyone claims all religion is fucked up but there’s only one where this is actually extremely common… and the other religion that is mass adopted has different problems.
Mixing religion with political policy here is the problem.
The problem is religion.
Go back to /r/atheism.
I like how everyone claims all religion is fucked up but there’s only one where this is actually extremely common
what
You’re in the vast minority here simping for religion
I’m agnostic. I just don’t think atheism is my religion, unlike some of the people on this thread.
Most people have watched religion destroy lives. In fact we all have. Just a matter of admitting it. It doesn’t require any sort of special magical thinking to admit that.
I’m old enough to remember everyone getting all bent out of shape by Sinead O’Connor ripping up a picture of the Pope.
She was a couple of years early, but right.
It’s worth mentioning that Joe Pesci did SNL the following week and said “I would have gave [sic] her such a smack. I would’ve grabbed her by her … eyebrows.” AFAIK he has never apologized for this.
Not only Joe Pesci, also Madonna and others. But fuck Joe Pesci for not even apologizing after her death.
NBC did not rebroadcast the live performance unedited until 2025, when it was featured in the documentary film Ladies & Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music. In it, Lorne Michaels stated that he had “admired the bravery of what she’d done, and also the absolute sincerity of it”, though no mention was made of prior negative comments from him or the show.
Oh FUCK Lorne Michaels. What a lying sack of dog feces.
But she paid a huge price for being too early :(
Didn’t she go full Islam afterwards though? Like… Bruh.
Can you blame her?
Can you blame her for recognizing and turning her back on a harmful patriarchal religion that victimizes women and children and turning to… Islam? Yeah, I can.
I don’t. Her talent doesn’t make her anything special outside of that talent. A person can do the wrong thing for the right reasons.
Also, it happened during a time when Muslims were facing torment from the outside world because of 9/11. She wasn’t the only artist to convert to Islam during that time, but most of the ones I remember reading about at least had some potential connection to the religion through their ancestry.
Some people cannot fathom a world without religion, even when they see the destruction in what they’re familiar with. If you spend your heart fighting one enemy, it’s a lot easier to miss the crimes of the enemy next door, especially if that enemy is a perceived underdog.
Edit:
2018 is when she converted apparently, but she still would have seen and felt the post 9/11 world. I don’t know much of anything so disregard everything I said if you want to or tell me why I’m an idiot if I deserve it.
I question your judgement, and hers, but I also think people should be able to make poor choices so long as bystanders aren’t hurt. If she’s funding jihad, that’s a problem (and I don’t know if she is or not). If she’s living and letting live, I’m not going to criticize. I’ll make my own, different, poor choices.
No.
Show your work.
I mean, it was 26 years after the pope thing but she did convert to Islam. Even changed her name.
HUH. Okay, fair enough.
Islam in and of itself is not problematic, not anymore than Christianity at least. Like with literally every religion, it’s the strict conservatives within the religion that are the ones who enforce ridiculous mores and dress codes and other things that are detrimental to the health of the followers of that religion.
It’s just funny that she could see the cruelty towards children and women in one religion and not another that is equally culpable.
Again, religion does not equal church. She spent a lot of time as a Catholic trying to make other Catholics see the evils within the church. I think she just became tired of being the town cryer in a world that doesn’t give a shit. And Islam, the religion and belief system not the various organized churches, might have held some amount of peace for her soul. Criticizing her for converting and not starting a whole new crusade to stop the myriad of abuse found within the various sects of Islam is just silly. Especially since there are already a million voices pointing out the faults in the Islamic churches already.
Sinéad AKA Shuhada begs to differ
“This is to announce that I am proud to have become a Muslim. This is the natural conclusion of any intelligent theologian’s journey. All scripture study leads to Islam. Which makes all other scriptures redundant. I will be given (another) new name. It will be Shuhada’”
— Shuhada’ Davitt (@MagdaDavitt77) AKA Sinéad O’Connor
She left main stream catholicism before the SNL incident: “The 51-year-old was previously ordained a priest by a breakaway Catholic sect, the Irish Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic Church, in the late 1990s” source: Irish Post
She was a troubled being (who wouldn’t be with her childhood?), so not all her decisions are relatable. Converting to main stream (Sunni) Islam still sticks out as weird.
Yeah, you are still pinning her for her belief in Islam because members of Islam have been and continue being vile detestable people. But they aren’t vile detestable people because of their belief in Islam any more than the Christians, Catholic or otherwise, are evil because of their belief in Christianity. They are vile and detestable people regardless of their belief. Their religious beliefs isn’t the source, though it does end up being a justification for those acts. But that’s just sophistry used to cover their own prejudices.
She dumped Christianity and chose a different religion. That doesn’t make her culpable for the evils of that religion any more than anyone else is for the deeds of others who believe in the same religion they do.
I remember that and I still listen to Mandika.
Sometimes, all it takes to be ostracised and threatened is to be the first to say something that’s true.
She didn’t really explain much at the time though, and when she did it never got a lot of publicity. People thought she was just attacking Catholics as a whole.
All most people saw was her ripping up a picture, going “fight the real enemy” and then a bunch of smear articles about her going mental.
- According to the church, babies are without sin. If they die at birth, they go straight to heaven.
- Abortion was illegal at the time.
- Contraception was not widely available at the time, heavily discouraged by the church, and was still very primitive and hit-and-miss.
- There were far more unwed mothers having babies than couples who couldn’t have children, but wanted them.
1+1=2.
Ummm this article is either old or this has happened multiple times now and I am really not going to investigate further myself because I want to go to bed unsad tonight.
It appears that this is a new article with updated details on a news story that’s been evolving for a decade. So, it’s the same one you’ve heard about before, just with a bit of new information.
The article is new because the excavation just started, the home operated between 1920 and 1961. But it has happened in multiple locations in the UK. So, all of the above.
Ireland is not in the UK.
June 17, 2025 2:01pm PDT
Yeah, it’s an old story. What’s new is they’ve started excavating it.
June 17, 2025… seems pretty new
Flush alligators not children.
Maybe don’t flush alligators either.
You seem biased.
Looks like all the kids died of disease? Definitely evidence that the world has gotten better not worse.
Well, some things. Science and medicine are two of the things that I count as consistently bettering our lives.
Don’t jinx it, the antivax crowd certainly is growing. And then there is Maha.
The disease / pre-existing condions being “born out of wedlock” and “being in a catholic children camp”.
Since the excavations just happen now as survivors and the general public wont shut up about the atrocities, and ITT there are still plenty of apologist I’m not sure how thick the veneer of better is.
Listen, the Child Mortality Rate from 1935 for ages 1-3 was 13 times that of 2020, according to USA HHS data compiled in a report by GovInfo.
Do I think these children had exasperated risk factors such as psychological stress and malnutrition? Yes.
Do I think these Nuns were practicing health and safety in accordance with a proper understanding of germ theory? No.
Is anybody surprised that this many babies died? No. The shock value here is they didn’t even get buried properly. They’re not psychopathic murdernuns, they’re just the regular people whose sin is never learning the truth or not believing it, of which still exist in droves today.
Sorry, I should have put the sources list at the bottom of my reply.
First off you can’t compare US mortality rates to Irish ones, especially if you can’t apply it to the numbers.
From the Wikipedia article on Tuam: Writing in a 2012 HSE report, Declan McKeown, a consultant public health physician and medical epidemiologist stated that the infant mortality rate in the home were “similar to those recorded at Bessborough” (another mother and baby home), which were five times the rate for Ireland in 1950 and 65 times the 2012 rate. McKeown stated that these rates were equivalent to the infant mortality rate in Ireland in the 1700s.
That seems disturbingly high, don’t you think?
Also check out at least that 1st Arte video. It is not long and features a couple of survivors.
After consuming the sources below I have to say that the disposal of the bodies is IMHO the least atrocious thing that was committed.
Sources:
But abortion is immoral, right?
nope, not if you wait for 9 months before exercising that option, apparently.
Not in the 4th trimester
well beat my record.
Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bon_Secours_Mother_and_Baby_Home .
The mothers were required to stay inside the home for one year, doing unpaid work for the nuns, as reimbursement for some of the services rendered. They were separated from their children, who remained separately in the home, raised by nuns, until they could be adopted – often without consent.
Some women who had had two confinements were sent directly to nearby Magdalene laundries after giving birth, as punishment for their perceived “recidivism”. According to Professor Maria Luddy, "Such a stance, though not intended to be penal, allowed for the development of an attitude that accepted detention as a means of protecting society from these reoffending women.
Confinements. Punishment. Detention. Reoffending women.
Is it possible to pin replies? For some reason this was almost at the bottom for me.
Also I can add some more sources, that Fox article is really bad:
Damn those fucking monsters. Worse of all I bet the lived with no consequences…
What in the fuck
